Chronic Care Management in the Home
Many otherwise busy adults are sandwiched between generations of older and younger relations that rely on them for care. Many baby boomers take responsibility for helping an aging parent retain an independent life in his or her own home, rather than moving to an institutional facility. Others are assisting a developmentally delayed child or grandchild grow into an independent and functional lifestyle. Still others may help a sibling cope with a chronic health condition.
Whatever the situation, there are many opportunities for home technologies to support the important communication and coordination tasks a network of formal and informal caregivers. The same technologies that revolutionized and “flattened” the workplace can now make life easier in the home. These technologies have the potential to greatly reduce health care costs, by allowing people to live independently in their own homes, rather than being forced into institutional care facilities.
Some of the research the Aware Home Research Initiative is capbable of or in the process of investigating include:
• Empirical studies of home-based health management practices, including chronic disease care and healthy lifestyle adherence
• Interactive tools that promote health education and care by utilizing sophisticated home health monitoring
• Visualizations and ambient display techniques to present health monitoring results in a way appropriate for the home
• Understanding home support needs of older adults
• Developing a framework for technology acceptance concerns, especially those around privacy and automation issues
Current Projects
Sympathetic Devices
Researchers: Claudia Winegarden, Brian Jones, Jenna Schmidt, Ted Ulrich
Sympathetic Devices is a project focusing on communication devices for aging individuals across all levels of housing options. The overarching goal of the project is to address social isolation and depression by first understanding how individuals currently socialize and internalize during everyday activities, then designing devices to help them develop social relationships and support groups, as well as manage personal goals. This research is funded through a joint seed grant awarded by GVU Center and the Health Systems Institute at Georgia Tech
http://datha.gatech.edu
Early Detection of Developmental Delay
Julie Kientz, Tracy Westeyn, Ping Wang, Rosa Arriaga, Gregory Abowd
We are interested in designing technology to help detect, record, and track important developmental milestones that occur in children during their first 5 years of life. By tracking these milestones, we can help parents and healthcare providers detect developmental delays such as autism, deafness earlier, which can improve the effects of interventions.
Past Projects
Abaris Julie Kientz, Gregory Abowd
Abaris is a fully functioning prototype capture and access application to support therapists who perform Discrete Trial Training therapy, a current best practice intervention for children with autism. We have evaluated Abaris in homes and schools to determine its effectiveness in supporting data-based decision-making through better collaboration, better access to reliable artifacts, and higher confidence in decision-making. read more
http://home.cc.gatech.edu/julie/24
CareLog Gillian Hayes, Gregory Abowd
CareLog is a mobile capture and access application for recording health and education data in informal settings.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~gillian/research/CareLog.htm
FETCHJulie Kientz, Arwa Tyebkhan, Shwetak Patel, Gregory Abowd
FETCH is a mobile system for aiding the visually impaired in locating their misplaced objects in many locations. Through a focus group and individual interviews with the visually impaired, we discovered a need for a quick, temporary tagging system for frequently lost objects that can be used in many locations. We deployed this system with 4 users in visual impariments on a mobile phone using Bluetooth tags.
Cook’s CollageQuan Tran, Beth Mynatt
The Cook’s Collage supports a cook’s memory of which ingredients have been added how many times for any recipe. The information display presents a running visual summary of the ingredients’ sequence and counts by capturing images in real-time of the cook adding ingredients by a "wizard-of-oz" simulation (i.e., a human operator hand picks images from live video feed).
http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ecl/projects/dejaVu/cc/index.html
digital family portraitJames Rowan Elizabeth Mynatt
The Digital Family Portrait reconnects family members by providing a qualitative sense of a distant relative�s well-being while striking a reasonable balance between privacy and the need for information. Like a traditional portrait, it is designed to be hung on the wall or propped on a mantle, blending with household decorations.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ecl/projects/dfp/index.html
dude's magic box & grandma's lapdeskJim Rowan Elizabeth Mynatt
One function historically performed by aging adults (grandparents) in an extended family is that of the care and nurturing of grandchildren. Clearly, geographical distance disrupts all forms of this function. Technological support that reconnects the grandchildren and the grandparents can not only restore this historically significant function and therefore be of benefit to both parties, it can also address issues of social isolation.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ecl/projects/dude/
Technology AcceptanceWendy Rogers, Koert van Ittersum, Dan Fisk, Len Parsons, Kelly Caine, Marita O’Brien & Sung Park
This survey of research on acceptance of technology was conducted to identify and clarify those variables that influence technology acceptance, particularly those that related to aspects of the technology itself. The results of this survey are an organizational schema for all of the variables as well specific guidance on the generalized effects of relevant variables such as perceived usefulness, perceived compatibility, and perceived privacy.
http://www.hfaging.org/projects.html
The Technology CoachWendy Rogers, Dan Fisk & Irfan Essa
We took an interdisciplinary approach (human factors and computer science) to develop a technology “coach” that could support older adults in learning to use a medical device. Our system provided a computer vision system to track use of a blood glucose meter and provide users with feedback if they made an error. This research has potential for the development of an in-home personal assistant that could coach individuals in a variety of tasks necessary for independent living.
SuperAssist: Personal Assistants for Distributed Supervision of Complex Task environmentsOlivier Blanson Henkemans, Wendy Rogers, Dan Fisk
The project aims at developing models for the supervision of older diabetic’s self-care, including maintaining a healthy life style, and use of medical instruments, and communication with remote medical and technical specialists. We specifically focus on the influence of assistant dialogue on the patient self-care, concerning the assistant’s level of automation of the patient level of participation.
http://www.hfaging.org/projects.html#superassist
Living Memory BoxMolly Stevens, Khai Truong, Florian Vollmer, Gregory Abowd
Digital archives of personal memories are becoming increasingly technically feasible, but there remain significant interaction design challenges. In this paper, we present a research and design study of the Living Memory Box, a device and service to assist families in preserving memories in a variety of media forms. Through a series of ethnographic interviews, design activities and focus groups, we have developed recommendations for the design and development of future personal memory systems and appliances.